Residents crowd the entrance of a shopping mall to shop for food supplies in Tacloban City ahead of the arrival of Typhoon Hagupit
AFP/Manila
A super typhoon gained strength on Thursday as it tracked towards the Philippines, threatening more devastation for mostly poor communities where thousands of people have died in an annual tirade of mega storms.
Weather forecasters warned Hagupit, already generating wind gusts of 230 kilometres (143 miles) an hour, would continue to intensify as it swept in from the Pacific Ocean, and likely hit eastern islands on Saturday.
"Let's prepare for everything," President Benigno Aquino told a nationally televised meeting of disaster agency chiefs, after hearing warnings of giant storm surges and house-destroying winds.
Authorities said Hagupit would likely hit or pass near areas yet to recover from Super Typhoon Haiyan, the most powerful storm ever recorded on land that killed or left missing more than 7,350 people in November last year.
In Tacloban, one of the cities worst-hit by Haiyan, some residents began evacuating from vulnerable coastal areas well ahead of Hagupit's expected arrival, while others emptied supermarket shelves of essential supplies.
"I survived Haiyan. I hope God will save me from Hagupit as well," 94-year-old grandmother Florentina Azcarga told AFP as her extended family of eight moved into a sports stadium in Tacloban.
Azcarga, who can no longer walk, and her family left their home with a pot of rice and bags of clothes to join hundreds of others in the stadium who had evacuated ahead of official orders.
With Hagupit still 800 kilometres from the Philippines, weather forecasters were not able to say exactly where the storm would hit and the government was yet to issue mandatory evacuation orders.
But on its projected track, Hagupit could affect a region populated by 4.5 million people, Orla Fagan, regional spokeswoman for the UN disaster agency, told AFP.
The Philippines endures an average of 20 major storms a year, many of them deadly.
But the Southeast Asian nation, with a population of 100 million, has in recent years faced unusually strong storms that scientists have warned are linked to climate change.
More than 1,900 people were left dead or missing after Typhoon Bopha hit the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, an area that does not normally experience major storms, in December 2012.
In December 2011, 1,268 people were killed when Tropical Storm Washi caused massive flooding in another part of Mindanao.
Haiyan, Bopha and Washi were the world's deadliest storms of the past three years.